The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  Joe shook his head. If I’d known Lillian was so bad with computers, I might not be here. He flipped to the end of the contract where the order form was stapled.

  When Lillian had provided an explanation of the first ghost debacle as justification for a new ghost, she’d apparently accidentally copied and pasted something that didn’t belong. Submitted as part of her demand for a highly skilled replacement was the fake, impossible profile we’d jokingly uploaded to her dating site.

  Looking For The Following Qualifications:

  • The face of a movie star and the body of a superhero

  • Able to give orgasms by mere proximity

  • Inertia unwelcome. Proactively finds solutions to problems; not afraid of taking the steps necessary to get ahead.

  So, a word of caution. The next time you order a ghost— Joe began.

  “There isn’t going to be a next time. I’m a one-ghost girl.” I snuggled against his superhero chest and gazed adoringly up at his movie-star face, quite visible since he’d gotten a head. “Now about that second bullet point . . .”

  Jonquils in the Snow

  Annette Blair

  One

  Amishman Caleb Skylar shifted the sleepy six-year-old in his arms and stepped from the empty house to the porch that ran full around it, wondering if the ghost that led him to this place would disturb his peace as much as the one he’d left behind.

  His people did not believe in ghosts, and yet no footstep marred the veneer of snow that covered Dovecrest Farm like a pall. Flanked by rich fields and lush pastures, it appeared as if the farm’s inhabitants had all passed reluctantly on, leaving their uneasy spirits behind.

  He’d read the sign in the window: FARM FOR SALE. SEEK HANNAH PEACHY WITHIN. But the house stood empty. “This seems as good a place as any to make a new start,” he said aloud, as if to prove that he was still alive. “What say you, Susiekins?”

  “No.” With a pout, Susie rubbed her big doe eyes to keep them from closing. “Mommy cannot watch over me from heaven if we hide on this faraway hill. She will not know where to find me.”

  Caleb glanced beyond silver skies and clouds heavy with snow. “Naomi,” he said. If you are up there . . . “Our Susie lives two hundred miles to the west at the top of the rise.”

  A good farm, this – though he supposed it would have been better if a spirit had not led him here. The specter, an Amish woman with wispy sunshine curls that escaped her kapp, and a dimpled smile that eased his troubled heart, had twirled in the farm’s driveway on arrival, as if she’d come home.

  Dancing was forbidden to their people, but in heaven, maybe not.

  After he’d packed up Susie for a quick escape, and set aimlessly off, the spirit of the unknown woman appeared, as if from nowhere, skipping in front of his buggy.

  Allowing himself to be led by joy – rather than sorrow – for a change, Caleb found himself helpless to do anything but follow. Assuming she’d been sent by a higher power, he’d acted on blind faith. Hard to believe he had any of that left. And as his matched bays clip-clopped behind the dancing spirit, she reminded him of his need to live, not mourn, and make Susie laugh again.

  He sighed. “How can we buy this farm?” he muttered. “If no one is here to sell it to us?”

  That joyful spirit reappeared and motioned for him to come. He followed once more – she, walking backward, maintaining her distance, without so much as a footstep in the snow to show for her guiding presence.

  Caleb finally saw a woman across the narrow dirt road – a living breathing woman, her back to him as she knelt in the grabhoff, the Amish graveyard, her black winter bonnet and shawl stark against the snow. “She must be freezing,” he said to himself.

  The mourner drew him to her in a way he could no more explain than resist – in the way the specter had drawn him – and though Caleb hesitated, the spirit indicated that he should proceed, hurry even. So he did.

  Iced blades of grass crisped beneath his feet as he gave less thought to the specter’s reason for bringing him here, than to his for doing her bidding. Desperate times, he supposed. Besides, the mourner might know where he could buy the abandoned farm.

  Moving forward had become his only hope, for his sake as well as his daughter’s. No going back to that place where Naomi’s life had ended and Susie’s nightmares began.

  A nudge on the graveyard’s wooden gate made it swing open fast and wide, the wail and clatter of it as it hit the fence alerting the mourner to his presence. Kneeling in the middle of the headstones, she stiffened. Fear, he thought it was called.

  Meanwhile, his specter waved him over. Engraved on the tablet: “Anyah Peachy, beloved sister, best friend”. She had died at the age of twenty-three.

  A deep sense of sorrow overtook him.

  The spirit indicated the middle stone. “Baby Grace Barkman, beloved daughter”. Grace left this earth the day she arrived, the same day Anyah died.

  On another near gravestone: “Gideon Barkman, husband, father”. Same date of death. The word “beloved” markedly missing – a feeding frenzy for the gossips.

  Caleb stopped close beside the trembling woman and waited patiently until she had no choice but to look up at him.

  His heart raced when she did. He thought never to see another such as her. As ethereal up close as from a distance, her dimpled smile tugged at the cold hidden part of him. He fought the pull, shivered and pushed the quilt closer around Susie, asleep, finally.

  “How old is your little one?” she asked, her dulcet voice soothing as she turned to set another bulb in the frosty earth.

  “Susie is six,” he said with forbidden pride.

  “She must be heavy.”

  “Ya,” Caleb said. “But I like the weight of her, especially her little head on my shoulder. Makes me feel safe.”

  While Anyah faded, her twin sat back on her heels, assessing, nodding. “It is good that you know what you have. My little one sleeps here beneath the snow. I felt safe when I held her, too. But winter – it lives in my heart all the time now.” She patted the snow-cloaked earth, as if to make her little one more comfortable.

  Caleb slipped his gaze back to the gravestones. Her babe had died two years ago. Still, her pain must be as tangible as the warmth of Susie’s breath on his neck.

  Caleb started to speak but was forced to clear his throat first. “I do not think your Grace would want you to live so long in winter,” he said, reminding himself not to shun such wisdom. “Spring can be beautiful,” he added, meaning it for the first time in months.

  “Winter has its own beauty,” she replied, and Caleb believed it, because this woman with the winter heart must be one of God’s most beautiful creations.

  She turned to the grave on her left and began, again, to dig. Gideon had been twenty-nine.

  “Your husband?” Caleb asked, regretting the seemingly casual question the minute it passed his lips.

  The woman’s jagged half-nod, her demeanor, alert and strained, no longer revealed a serene acceptance. Guilt, he saw darken the gold of her eyes, raw and unbearable.

  He knew it well. “I am sorry,” he said, as if she might understand the yoke of self-blame he regretted for both their sakes.

  “A buggy accident,” she said, looking into a painful past, her deer-in-lantern-light expression proving that she did not understand his burden any more than her own. “It happened so fast,” she whispered. “Gideon died instantly. I was thrown and . . . Gracie was born, there, on the side of the road.”

  “Anyah?” Caleb asked. The specter was behind her, this time with a babe in her arms.

  “Anyah was thrown too, but she crawled to me, helped me hold the babe, and after . . . after . . . Anyah promised that she and Gracie would walk together with God.”

  Caleb cleared his throat, and ignored the sheen hazing his vision. “So you lost all three, your husband, your child and your twin.”

  “No, you are mistaken. I lost everything. Myself even.”

&n
bsp; Two

  The young widow stood and gazed beyond Caleb’s shoulder toward the horizon. “I have yearned for two years to join Anyah and Grace.” The woman shrugged and regarded him with acceptance. “But I am still here.”

  Acceptance, duty: they were everything in the Amish faith, or they were supposed to be, but Caleb had come to the rebellious conclusion that they were not enough. “I understand,” he said.

  If not for Susie, he might leave the faith altogether. Unable to say more, because the knot in his throat and heart made words useless and impossible, Caleb shook his head in apology.

  The woman understood; he saw it in her eyes. And she smiled, as if, inside him, she had seen something . . . worthy, and suddenly, all around him, a lingering darkness began to recede.

  As grateful as he was shaken, Caleb experienced a heart-jolt, foreign and disorienting, like the ground had just dropped from beneath him.

  How odd that guilt and sorrow had driven him from home, and somewhere along his lost way, he’d entered this confusing, compelling realm of crystalline perception, where he and a stranger saw into each other’s souls.

  The resulting face-warming discomfort was almost enough to make him want his understandable, if unstable, world back. Almost.

  The widow seemed to agree, because with a swipe of her muddy hands down her white apron, she brought him back to reality with a jolt, the color contrast as jarring as black wool on snow . . . or flower bulbs in a frozen earth.

  “Are you lost?” she asked, the mundane question further settling him. And for someone like him with a winter heart, her smile could surely bring the sun.

  “My name is Caleb Skylar, Mrs Barkman. I seek Hannah Peachy so I may purchase Dovecrest Farm.” Facing this woman, he felt . . . resurrected. God help him.

  “I am Hannah Peachy.”

  He checked her husband’s name.

  “Yes, I went back to my maiden name. I like to keep the gossips busy. Come, I will show you the property. Would you like me to carry Susie for a bit?”

  Surprised at her offer, Caleb stopped and, when he did, he caught in her expression a longing he suspected Hannah Peachy would want no one to see.

  “I would not mind,” she said, pleading in her own way.

  Caleb did not want to deny her, and yet . . . “It is just— Susie would scream if she woke in your arms. She is afraid of everyone, except me.”

  Shoulders lowering the barest measure, Hannah Peachy nodded and walked on, while reciting a litany of the farm’s good and bad points, from orchards, fields, farm equipment, to barn. “The daudyhaus is through the kitchen,” she said.

  “I have no ageing parents or in-laws to live there,” Caleb said, “but I suppose friends could stay there as they pass through town.”

  “Anyah lived in ours.” Hannah’s smile grew wistful.

  “I already like the house,” Caleb said, stepping in behind her. “Susie and I took a tour when we first looked for you. Though it is bigger than a bachelor with one child needs—”

  “I am offering it with furniture and linens, dishes and pans. Furnishing a place so large would be your biggest concern, and that is not necessary.”

  “I left everything of our old life behind, it is true,” he said, “and your banked-barn will be a luxury on a farm the size I can manage alone, but your thresher and manure-spreader sold me.”

  He counted out $200 in cash, and Hannah accepted it, hands trembling, and tucked it into her apron pocket as if it could save her soul. And though she had already washed the mud off her hands, she swiped them down her apron again. “I will be out in an hour,” she said, posture and expression relaxing as if she’d shed a great burden.

  “I did not intend to put you out tonight,” Caleb said, confused by her eagerness. “Where will you go?”

  Hannah led him around the house and pointed to the small home on the next property halfway between Dovecrest Farm and Dove Hollow. “There is my new house, ready to move in.”

  “At twenty-five, you will live alone?”

  She firmed her lips and raised her chin. “Yes. I can barely wait to move out,” she said. “I no longer wish to eat from the dishes our friends gave us with hopes for a long and happy life, or to sleep alone beneath my wedding quilt.”

  Her last words came out wrong; they both knew it. Hannah firmed her lips, but the implication lingered. With anyone else, a tease would have been in order, but Caleb understood that Hannah mourned not so much a long wedded life as a happy one, and more than that, she mourned the loss of her babe, for which there were no words.

  Blushing despite herself, he rather suspected, Hannah raised her chin. “I have to go now, Mr Skylar.”

  “We are neighbors,” he said. “I will call you Hannah and you will call me Caleb, please. And you will come to eat supper in the kitchen of my new house tonight. And maybe when you do, you can tell me where to find the pots and pans I need to cook Susie’s dinner? At noon, we ate the last of the provisions my Pennsylvania neighbors made for our journey. I am desperate.”

  Her unexpected laugh rang as pure and refreshing as a dipper of spring water on a hot summer day. “I will come, only if you and Susie share my supper. Seems I never lost the habit of making enough food for— I cook too much. I will see you at six?”

  “I thought you would never offer,” Caleb said, bringing her near-smile.

  At six that night, with an efficiency of movement and knowledge of her surroundings, Hannah Peachy took a battered blue enamel coffee pot from the bottom of an old oak corner cupboard, and shut the door with her hip. “When will Susie awaken from her nap?” she asked, scooping coffee from a jar in the pantry. “I cannot wait to meet her. Does she always nap during the day?”

  “She sleeps when it is light. Rarely in the dark. Do not be in such a hurry; she will blister your ears with her crying when she claps eyes on you. You will not take it personally, please. She has been this way ever since—” She found her mother’s body floating in the pond, he could not say.

  Caleb gave a half-nod, hating that he could still tear up. “We both have our ghosts and our regrets, you and I, Hannah, but for Susie’s sake, if not our own, we will not let them get us down, yes?”

  “No. Yes? I am hoping she will awaken soon. I want to meet her.”

  He sighed. “And the longer she sleeps now, the less sleep I will get tonight,” Caleb said, looking for movement on the kitchen’s daybed. He got up to take matters into his own hands.

  Hannah watched her new neighbor lift his daughter into his arms and kiss the shell of her ear peeking just beneath her tiny prayer kapp, amazed at the rare surge of anticipation she experienced, almost as if she’d come alive again, despite her hopes to the contrary.

  In a twinkling, life could change, she remembered. Sometimes . . . for the better.

  Caleb and Susie had dragged her too easily onto a plane of existence where lack of feeling was not allowed; a place less comfortable, perhaps, but more expectant. More painful in some ways, but far less grim.

  While Hannah pondered it, the remarkable mix of brawn and gentleness that was Caleb Skylar crooned to his daughter in Penn Dutch. He called her his liebchen, his little love.

  At such gentleness, emotion, untamed and all encompassing, swamped Hannah. It clogged her nose, blocked her throat and threatened to spill onto her lashes.

  To keep her new neighbor from noticing, she turned to fill the pot from the pump at the zinc-lined dry sink while she took several deep, calming breaths.

  How could so simple a thing as a man’s tenderness do this to her?

  Because she had been proved unworthy of receiving and incapable of giving love by her father and her husband. Because with the parents Gracie would have had, Hannah feared her babe fared better with Anyah in heaven.

  Suddenly grief stung her eyes, and tightened her chest, the surge threatening to overwhelm her.

  Then Caleb crooned her name, one brawny arm turning her into him, her face pressed against his broadfall jacket, ke
eping her there when she would pull away, saying without words that life must go on whether we want it to or not.

  She never cried. She had never cried for Anyah and Gracie. Now a stranger comforted her, and her sobs hurt, they grew so harsh. When a small, stroking hand touched her kapp, Hannah stepped back, afraid to frighten the child.

  Grief passed that fast, because it must, but the battle against Caleb’s embrace and Susie’s touch left her weak, battered.

  If she were not careful, Caleb Skylar and his little Susie would destroy the peace she had worked so hard to attain. She ran her hands down her apron, pushed longing aside. When she stepped back, she came face to face with a pair of big brown eyes, as bright, inquisitive and all-seeing as Caleb’s.

  “Hello there, Susie-Q,” Hannah said in Penn Dutch, her arms aching to hold the sleep-warm child to her heart. “You want some goot schnitz pie for dessert?”

  Caleb stiffened as if for the worst, but Susie failed to cry. She nodded instead. “Yes please.” Then she reached out and caught the tear on Hannah’s cheek, her touch like a blessing.

  Caleb regarded his daughter with wide, amazed eyes.

  Hannah was sure she did the same. “Life changes in a blink,” she said, “and we seem never to be prepared, good or bad.”

  Three

  Hannah could not draw Susie out during supper, but neither did Susie scream as Caleb had predicted. She did, however, sit quietly in his lap throughout.

  Hannah poured Caleb a second cup of coffee to go with his second piece of pie. She liked his hearty appetite, his warm appreciation for her cooking. She liked the way his long hair waved away from his square jaw, the red lights in his beard, twinkling almost as bright as the mischief in his wise brown eyes. She liked that within that large, capable body beat a good and gentle heart.

  She’d liked him on sight, the way he cuddled Susie. A man who could love a child and still act the man – something new to her, a wonder. “What did you intend to do, Caleb, if I had not been willing to move right out?” Hannah asked. “Had you a place to stay tonight?”